


Persistence of Ruin

by Wrathmorphic



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Tags to be added, descriptions of gore and related items, more or less anyway, roadtrip au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 12:16:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16702390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wrathmorphic/pseuds/Wrathmorphic
Summary: It is not so much where you are as who you are. It follows you, clings to you, once you have touched the hallowed streets. Maybe it even comes from you, now, radiating out like fog from a lake in fall.





	1. Wrecked Aspirations of a Peaceful Retreat/Matchbook

It started as dripping, a mundane if annoying sound, too easy to get used to. There had been plenty of cheap motels close to collapse along the road, plenty of small rooms filled with the tiny sounds of poorly-maintained buildings complaining about their own decay, plenty of thin walls and ceilings groaning and thumping with misplaced luggage and the footsteps of other travelers. It was hard to sleep to, but the irregular lullaby became a sort of comfort-slash-reminder that I was someplace real, populated, living.

I fled empty halls and streets. I hate emptiness and silence. I fear it.

So it was easy to assume, despite everything I had learned, that the sink or bathtub in my room were at fault and faulty. That they were normal. Something safe. I was half asleep and sore and had absolutely no focus or drive to analyze every sound. The thick, slow plap-plap sound of liquid on cheap plastic was just that to me. My dreams, though, dug up other memories of that sound. A red, wet sound. A corpse effigy in a room full of mirrors. Moth-eaten black wings and scabs of stolen blood stiffening long hair to grimy points. How an IV bag feels underfoot. The smell of rot, ammonia and tarnished metal, mingling chemical and organic stenches threatening to pull my consciousness under.

In the mirrors, I thought I saw the wings of the posed corpse twitch and shiver to life. The urge to scream broke into weak, wheezing whispers, all cries for help suffocated by fog thick enough to blind, thick enough to asphyxiate. Something loud crashed to the floor. But it sounded a lot like something heavy on cheap plastic, a lot like–

I woke up choking on my own attempts to scream, gripping the sheets as my heart and lungs fought each other in my rib cage. Grogginess gave way to clarity and a boost of adrenaline I never wanted. What had started as dripping was now more constant, thicker. I noticed red light edged my only path to escape with a bloody neon rim.

The worst thing about these "episodes" is always the smell. It’s made even walking past a deli section in a grocery store a small hell all its own, a reminder of witnessing a fresh kill. I thought I caught traces of that sick smell in the air and scrambled to untangle myself from the sheets with the singular focus of grabbing my bags and running out, checkout times and a full night’s sleep be damned.

There was a point I swore to myself I wouldn’t look in the bathroom. I wouldn’t acknowledge what was happening, or what might be happening. Convincing myself it would be simple took longer than it should have; I stood frozen in silence with my bags slung sloppily over each shoulder and clasped in one hand, my other hand holding the shirt I’d thrown on closed at the front like a lifeline as I watched two minutes glow past on the digital clock on the bedside table. Bright. Scarlet. The clock’s light matched the hue flashing out from the bathroom around and under the door. That too-clear red was the only light in the room, it made me feel watched and dissolved my courage like some kind of incandescent acid. The dripping only got louder, more like several streams, and the combination of light, sound and what I painstakingly made myself refer to as the “phantom” scent of fresh wounds made me sick and dizzy. Made my head hurt. Made me remember locked doors and jagged, dark concrete scraping my hands and knees.

By the time I finally heard a groan, and mumbling, human but still terrifying, the lump in my stomach solidified into a frazzled determination I was sickeningly familiar with. My bags hit the ground and I grasped in the dark, scrambling for any kind of solid weapon in case the sound of the bags dropping attracted attention I didn’t want. All I managed to get was a vase full of fake flowers, plastic and cheap like everything else in the motel. It would have to do. I could make it work, or at least hurt. I had to at least make it hurt. Paranoia and learned skills and luck made me plan ahead; these days there was always a book of matches in the left pocket of my shirts. The first didn’t strike, the second didn’t last, but the third ate away at the fabric of the flowers like a caterpillar and spread its sparks over airbrushed, dusty petals. The warm light gave me that last boost I needed.

My palm itched with fear as I flattened it against the scuffed, rattling faux-wood of the bathroom door in a nervous strike to throw it open. I barely noticed the melted, curling ash fall and blister my wrist, damage the carpet as pure, new fear made my sweat feel like ice that halted any hope of movement.

The ceiling above the wreck that had been the shower was a hole. A hole made of concrete and rebar rather than the cheap materials of the hotel, something too solid and vast to belong in a two-story motel. Blood dripped from the bright, sinister markings around the edge of the hole, sigils I had memorized out of necessity more than willingness. In the circle, collapsed in the tub, was a man. Soaking wet with blood and water that gleamed in the guttering light of my makeshift torch and the sigils from the town I’d put miles of asphalt behind myself to escape from. His hand clutched sorry scraps of paper, one impossibly red that made me feel like I’d go blind, the other thicker, crumpled and worn, somehow protected from the blood that covered him. An envelope, maybe. I was terrified to the point of that awful clarity again, that bright, cold fear burned the image in my mind. How blood and water looked on his military green coat, how it drew up into and streaked his pale hair red.

It might has well have been another corpse-effigy. Another damned angel covered in blood. Another burn and my arm jerked and flung my vase-torch to the floor. Blood snuffed flame. The sigil flickered out, or I blacked out. I’m still not sure which. I do remember the sound of mumbling and sobbing. I remember the red haze and crackling static like taking bad medicine, like too much medicine. The smell of fresh death, water.

The smell and feel of white flowers.

The sound of dripping. The sound of wailing sirens, the man-made cry of coming danger.

Sobbing. Apologies. Silence.

Forced peace like opiates in my blood dragged me into black, blank quiet.


	2. There's a Word For What Happened/Cyclical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [heather fills a dazed, recovering henry in. he almost wishes she hadn’t.]

When I could finally wake up, I still felt foggy and almost motion-sick. My eyelids were lead, my nerves were numb with a dull itch of returning sensation dusted over my heavy muscles. Everything was that dim, monotonous light of gloomy, overcast weather, and it hurt my eyes even more to try to open them against the diffused, relative brightness. My face stuck to the surface under me and took some effort to remove. The position I was in was pretty cramped and uncomfortable and as out of it as I was it took me too, too long to put together that I was in the backseat of a car, beside another unconscious person with a towel over their face and most of their body. I was convinced, for a moment, that the person next to me must have been dead and my heart anxiously tried to rattle my body into action and attempt another escape, which didn’t succeed. At all.

In fact, seeing straight became a total chore.

My stomach flipped with the returning, twisted memory of my night in the motel... I caught sight of what I thought were trees blurring by on the road out of the corner of my eye and I pitched head first into the seat in front of me with an embarrassing whimper, clutching it like that would end or at least ease my suffering. Or, bare minimum, my nausea. The movement in the world settled and I realized the car was parked, and the “trees” had actually been people walking by. It was a rest stop, but that was all I could figure out before I shoved my face further into the back of the seat in front of me.

A voice from the front passenger side, tired, scratchy. A girl. “Hey try not to yack in Dad’s backseat, okay?” I think I winced at her wording, but I felt the cool tap of a water bottle against my arm and accepted it even though it took me two grabs to actually get a grip on it. I mumbled a sorry and cracked open the bottle and exercised enough self control to keep me from chugging the contents in one desperate slurp. “Jeez you are a mess. The other guy hasn’t even budged much, though. Ssssso... You’re probably doing better.”

I tried to look at the “other guy” but had to turn my face down again, squeezing my eyes shut. All I caught was a small blur of military-looking olive fabric under the damp-looking towel that lay over him. That gave me the only clue I needed to realize the man that fell out of that hole above the shower–that gaping, dripping maw that smelled like low tide and meat oh god oh god it hurts to remember it it hurts my head– was the person in the seat next to me, propped up limply against the window while I had curled in my seat into a ball of miserable sleep for the ride we had apparently been taken on.

When I finally sat up I caught sight of myself in the rear-view mirror and took stock of my condition from another perspective. Leather seat-creases were imprinted on my cheek From where I was laying, I had more scruff than usual and my eyes had hideous purple-to-yellow circles under them like some kind of awful banner to announce how messed up I was. My hand numbly slapped over my face as I tried to rub my eyes, tried to grasp at some kind of shred of wakefulness or clarity. I finally felt a spark of tender pain and smelled some kind of ointment. Burns. Burn gel. The only sound I could manage was a slurred mumble… Not the question I had intended to ask the girl. She tried to cover a laugh with her hand and snorted.

Language skills were at an all time high, right up there with my sense of balance. Great. “Just. Give me a second.” I groaned and leaned all the way back (slowly, gingerly, painfully) staring at the car roof over me for what seemed like half an hour, but was probably more like a few minutes. Things were easier when I closed my eyes, so I shut the overcast, gloomy light out and tried to collect myself. “Okay… uh. Who’s Dad. I mean. Why are we in his car.”

“He’s coming back in a second, he can probably tell you better. All he was able to explain to me was the dog we picked up in the last town dragged him over to a trashed motel just off of the road and you and the soaked guy were outside of it in bad shape.”

Trashed? I had no idea what had happened after I blacked out the night before, but if the motel had been ruined... I panicked but tried to keep calm and gasped through my teeth a little anyway. “Anyone else there?”

“Dad– I mean Harry, that’s his name, and I’m Heather. I probably should have told you, this is messed up as it is without knowing who we are. Sorry. Anyway. He said he checked. The place had been abandoned for years. Nobody there Besides you guys, right? But some of the electricity was going. As soon as we got you guys in we saw something coming from the motel that the dog didn’t like and basically burnt rubber trying to get out of there, the car radio was going nuts like it was haunted. Creepy voices and everything.” I heard her pick something up and take a drink herself. “I wish I could say that was the first time something like that happened to us.”

“So… Wait. Abandoned? I checked into a motel last night but there were people there, working and staying over.” I swallowed hard and tried to make sense of it. “It was a shitty place, falling apart, but not abandoned or anything.”

“I have no idea… Uh…?”

There was a pause, her tone was expectant but I blanked out and left us in silence (except for a few small snores from the man under the towel) before I finally recognized the specific kind of ‘uh’ and remembered I should supply her with something to call me. “Oh. Oh. Sorry. I’m uh. Henry.”

“Henry. Cool. What I was saying is weird stuff like that seems to follow us. You’re the first people we’ve met that seem to notice it for miles.” It’s hard to tell if she sounds relieved, sorry, scared, or something else, but I felt like I could empathize with that emotion, whatever it was. “This is the first stop we’ve made since then I think. Maybe the second I think dad put some gas from our emergency jug in on the roadside but he didn’t seem happy about stopping until after daylight.”

“Ah. Uh. Where are we now? Do you know?”

“Just outside of Ashfield.” I stopped breathing for a bit as my whole chest tightened. I felt sick. We were right back where I had been three days ago when I had tried to escape the nightmare I had literally been living inside, and on top of that the amount of distance that kind of backtracking required–five states’ worth of distance, more or less– was impossible in ten hours, or at least impossible without getting pulled over for extremely reckless driving.

My mouth was almost too dry to speak. I reflexively reached for the matches in my breast pocket for comfort… Gone. Lost in that awful motel room, their marks left on my hand and wrist. Slowly, I sat up so I could look at Heather, hoping I’d see some kind of mischief in her eyes, hoping she was lying, even though I knew there was no reason for her to, or for her to know where I had come from to play a trick that complicated. “Wh-where was that motel you found us at?”

“That’s the worst part. It was somewhere just outside of Silent Hill.” She spat that name in a near-whisper and I felt cold sweat creep over my skin, clearing away some of my remaining hazed feeling out of pure fear. Silent Hill wasn’t an hour from Ashfield, let alone ten, and I had a sinking feeling Harry hadn’t just been driving in circles. Putting things together wasn’t hard. If the other man in the back seat had come from a hole with that awful sigil, and Heather talked like she knew Silent Hill then there was only one conclusion I could make.

That town wanted us back.


	3. I Would Rather Not Experience Jung's Synchronicity/Rare Perennials

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [white claudia is the only constant in the fog; Henry meets Mira and Harry]

Before everything had happened in Ashfield, I’d have the typical thoughts about seeing the world differently that come naturally with an interest in photography and art and sometimes clashed with pursuing a photojournalism degree. I enjoyed pulp anthologies of surreal fiction, magazines about writing and seeing the fantastic and terrifying in our everyday world and had even played with the idea of trying my hand at submitting writing to a student publication or something along those lines. Much later, after I’d lived through my own anthology comprised of horrors committed on twenty other lives as penned by a cult-groomed ghost, I found my joy in the surreal turn to disgust, revulsion. I didn't like it. I felt gross even looking at the covers of some of my books, once what should have stayed in those covers bled into the drywall of my apartment and walked as flesh and rust among the--

\--No. Keep going.

Words hadn’t been a strong point of mine before. They were pretty difficult to get down, let alone take critique on my raw chunks of what-ifs and half-remembered dreams. Even if people told me the stories were good so I never got as far as I wanted with writing. I accepted the stories I was best at telling were the ones I pulled through my aperture, with a camera on-hand. With pictures I could frame a scene in a way that removed it slightly from reality or turned the mundane fantastic in a way I could never achieve in language. Not to mention the act of showing pictures off was admittedly way easier on my anxiety than the editing process for short stories had been.

It was on my way back from a trip to Silent Hill I’d taken, just after a stay at the hospital and just before the locks appeared on my door, I remember stopping at a park on the outskirts just to look for some shots and I let my mind wander while I looked through my lens. Over benches and tables, poking my camera under spiderwebs to catch the sun, wedging myself sideways into things and laying down, just to see things a little different for every still frame. I had been hanging half way off of something, trying to get a picture of Lake Toluca without the sky when I slipped off of the park fence and skidded down the steep shore. I braced enough to slide in slowly, winding up knee-deep in Toluca’s muck and reeds and holding my camera and bag away from damage.

The smell of those flowers was something like orchids, unusually strong and sweet for something growing in lake silt. Unlike most reeds the leaves were rounded, almost like sage or snapdragons. The flowers, white and curled and bending the tops of their thin stalks with their weight, did look an awful lot like snapdragons in the way the petals folded over each other. I played with a couple of blossoms and some of the dried seed-pods, rolling the sticky white petals and noticing them bruise pink, noticing the deep red of the seeds inside those tiny, skull-shaped pods. Seed casings like skulls were one more thing the strange marsh flowers had in common with snapdragons, so I figured they were related species at the very least. I readjusted my lens and took as many shots of them–and my pink-stained hands against the shaded water–as I could, until my legs were cold and my eyes stung like I’d been staring into smoke.

As my fingers worked at the muzzle and aperture I recall thinking about how I’d never ever seen a plant like this before. It was probably local, but then again, in a town frequented by tourists wouldn’t most people automatically assume that? If there was ever something wrong or strange with the plant life in an area only strangers would see, people would never say much about it on the assumption it was something that could conceivably grow somewhere Even if it was unfamiliar, species vary.

Between the ideas I was having and the soaked legs of my jeans I got an excited chill. This was the kind of thing I loved reading about and I had managed to capture it in image form, here in Silent Hill. It was just as thrilling to me as the rides and lights of Lakeside had been to me when I was little.

Much, much later a different chill wracked my bones as I stood in the rest-stop park, staring at those flowers growing around the shoddy little fountain that served as decoration for the picnic area. Were they spreading? Had they been in Ashfield too all along? The smell reminded me of too many things It had accompanied, impossible things like walking into a forest straight from my apartment, like a man falling through the ceiling of my motel room through a bleeding concrete hole. Sickly sweet, like a funeral home. (Sickly sweet like his serene smile. No. No. Stop thinking of that.)

Whatever they were, the smell of them had filled my bathroom when the first hole appeared, wafting out of that nasty tunnel with an ebb and flow like something breathing.

I had only left the car briefly to use the rest stop bathrooms and stretch, but the sight and smell of those flowers made me want to crawl right back into that stranger’s jeep and sleep more. After staring in abject terror for a minute I shuffled away, grasping the front of my shirt out of anxious habit, pulling the sleeve painfully against my burn and apparently bruised chest. It took my mind off of the out-of-place flora as I remembered and realized someone must have taken care of my burns and buttoned my shirt when I couldn’t have. It was a relief and a terror to think about that, I was grateful and wary at the same time, eyeing my pained hand and down my shirt as if there would be some visual clue there as to whether I could trust these people or not. Stupid And lacking logic as it seemed to me it also felt like the only way I could really find out.

The tiled surface and echoes of the public bathrooms made me wary and jumpy, but that was nothing new; I’d always disliked public facilities of any kind even before crawling into that empty subway out of room 302. I rushed in and out, I probably looked over my shoulder more than necessary out of paranoia, and I definitely tried to ignore the flowers as I passed the fountain on the way back to where the jeep was parked… I definitely took one more look, lingering with my grasp on my shirt getting uncomfortably tight. I’m not sure I would have looked away, if I hadn’t heard a sharp bark to one side of me, causing me to brace myself just in time as something fuzzy and demanding nearly took me out with one decisive headbutt to the back of my knees.

“Hey! Hey, don’t do that. Mira, girl. Mira come back here!” A man stumbled over to grab the loose leash of the dog that had nearly caused me to eat dirt, shoving a cellphone in his pocket before he can get a good, honest grip on the lead. Once he was close, mildly scolding her and pulling her back from her enthusiastic investigation of the seat of my pants, she calmed down considerably, sitting by his feet and uttering a final, soft “boof” at me and tilting her head. “Sorry about that, Mira’s been a leash puller since we picked her up. It’s good to see you awake though.” He offers the hand without the leash in it to me, a gesture as warm and amiable and confident as his overall posture and voice. “I’m Harry. My daughter and I picked you and your friend up in that motel last night.”

“Oh. Oh right thank you so much.” Even though I felt bad for mumbling half of my gratitude inaudibly I actually felt a smile widen my mouth as I accepted the handshake. “It.. I heard it was a rough drive to get here I really appreciate it. I’m. Uh. Henry.” Saying my name took a couple of tries to get it loud enough for him to hear and it took a conscious effort for me to remember to(awkwardly) remove my hand from the death-grip on my shirt, especially with those flowers so close, with their too-thick smell hitting me in waves with the breeze.

He must have seen me glance back to the fountain, because he followed my gaze and released my hand. His tone was knowing, sympathetic somehow as he stared the strange reeds and their popcorn blossoms and skull-shaped husks. “I guess we have plenty of things to explain to each other, but that’s up to you. We’ll take you wherever you need to go from here.” He approached the flowers and looked around to check for anyone watching and produced a pocket knife to take a cutting of a few of the flowers. “I’ll get them pressed in a second I’m sorry, I know they smell strongly. Especially if you’ve been to…” He trailed off and gestured vaguely with his handful of flowers, but I knew what he was going to finish the sentence with. “I’ve been doing research, picking up as much as I can about that place and it’s much easier to grab outside of the town.”

I couldn’t stop myself from wincing a little. “I’ve never. Never uh. Seen it outside of Silent Hill. Before now.”

Harry doesn't meet my eyes, and I can't tell exactly why until he speaks again. “Neither have I.”

So, as it turns out, we were both feeling out if the situation was normal or not, it turned out that it was not in fact a normal situation, and I got hit with a cold sweat and a stiff breeze at the same time; refreshing, but I wished I would freeze to death right there, a little.

Looking impatient, Mira whines and paws at his leg, halting further attempts at speaking. “Alright, alright. We should get back before Heather comes out here to grab me, she never lets me hear the end of how long I take to get moving again once I stop somewhere.”


End file.
